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Smart rules and regimes: legal design towards regulating innovation

Technological innovation, presents us with both new opportunities and new risks, with increasing speed and impact. What role can law play in fostering the opportunities while providing safeguards against the risks? This is the challenge of 'smart rules and regimes', achieving topicality of legal regulation while balancing interests involved; being adaptable and robust at the same time. What legal approach is necessary to meet regulatory needs? In the seminar some first thoughts are presented on the possibilities of a legal design methodology which, apart from offering guidelines to regulation in general could perhaps be dedicated especially to innovative areas of legal regulation, where traditional 'copy paste' legal methods may not suffice. As such, both the aspect of the internal structure of norms as the external regulatory context of rulesand regimes, are addressed.

About the speaker

Michiel A. Heldeweg (1957; LLM Groningen, 1985; PhD Maastricht, 1993) is full professor of Public Governance Law at the faculty of Management & Governance (MB) and the institute for Innovation and Governance Studies (IGS) at the university of Twente the Netherlands. He is a member of the Netherlands Institute of Government (NIG), an associate senior member of the Ius Commune Research School (Leuven, Maastricht a.o.), and associated to the Netherlands Institute for Law & Governance (NILG - Groningen, Amsterdam a.o.)
Heldeweg is an Honorary Judge in the District Court of Almelo (the Netherlands), serving on the Administrative Law Bench.

His focus is on safeguarding the public interest in the context of the (new) regulatory state, with special interest in hybrid organizations and hybrid regulatory strategies, particularly with regards to:

legal aspects of governance, especially in the delivery of public services (safeguarding public values).

This approach includes research into a methodology of legal design (especially of 'smart rules and regimes') and of legal risk management (especially legal quality). Major areas of applied focus: environment and energy.